


Hell To Raise

by Tozette



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Harry Potter Does Dark Magic, Harry has necromancer powers, Not all Slytherins are evil, they're not as useful as you might think
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-28
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-02-23 01:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2528972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Harry knew that day was that his Aunt Petunia had begun to scream. When he came from his cupboard to see what was wrong, he found her sitting pale and distraught on the spotless kitchen tiles. She was gibbering as that evening’s three-kilogram chicken dinner did a rather acrobatic tap-dancing lap of the room, squawked loudly, and then fled through the window and out into the back yard.</p><p>----------------</p><p>In which Harry Potter animates the dead. Dumbledore disapproves. Other forces... not so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this fanfic for a little while, and the lovely [exoscopy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/exoscopy) has checked it over for me... sometimes.
> 
>  **Edit: 19/06/2016 -** so I changed this from a "Dark Harry Potter?" tag to a "Harry Potter Does Dark Magic" tag because 'dark Harry' refers to a specific trope, which this story doesn't really have. It does, however, have a fair bit of dark magic.

When Harry was four, he made a chicken dance. Some affinity with animals was not necessarily unusual in wizarding children and in many families displaying such a talent would have been cause for some celebration.

In Harry’s rather unique case, however, there were two issues:

1) Harry lived with his muggle relatives, who of course despised magic in its entirety and

2) the chicken in question was dead at the time

An affinity for living animals was one thing, but this second point would have been a rather more substantial concern for the wizarding world - if they’d ever learned of it.

All Harry knew that day was that his Aunt Petunia had begun to scream. When he came from his cupboard to see what was wrong, he found her sitting pale and distraught on the spotless kitchen tiles. She was gibbering as that evening’s three-kilogram chicken dinner did a rather acrobatic tap-dancing lap of the room, squawked loudly, and then fled through the window and out into the back yard.

Harry stared after it.

He opened his mouth to ask. He wasn’t meant to ask questions. He closed his mouth again with a click and bit his lower lip.

“Er,” he said cautiously.

She turned her reddened, teary eyes on him. “ _You_ ,” she hissed, getting shakily to her feet.

Harry’s guts clenched. He should have just stayed in his cupboard.

“This is your fault! Thought it was _funny_ , did you?” Her voice wobbled, some horrible tone between fear and anger and humiliation, “You - wretched, wicked - you, you _unnatural_ \--!”

Words seemed to fail her then, and Harry quickly found himself taken by the hair - she’d been aiming for his ear, but she’d missed and did not appear to be terribly concerned - and hauled along back toward his cupboard.

“I can’t even look at you,” she spat. The door slammed closed on him, the lock clicked.

Harry blinked in the darkness, rubbing the sore patch on his head.

Aunt Petunia left him there for some time. When Uncle Vernon got home he was released to avail himself of the lavatory and to stand quietly in the face of more yelling, and then Harry Potter remained in his cupboard all week. He was let out again when Petunia needed the garden weeded, and nobody ever spoke of the incident again.

It hung over them, though. It was some years before anybody in that house ate a roast chicken dinner again.

 

* * *

 

When Harry was six, there was a dog in Privet Drive.

The neighbourhood complained relentlessly about it, although they all smiled at the suburban couple who owned it. “It’s for the children, you know,” Petunia remarked to Mrs-at-Number-16, peering out through her lacy curtains at the backyard where the offending beast lived.

“Oh, quite, quite,” murmured the other woman, sipping from her floral-patterned teacup. “Good idea, teaches them to take some responsibility, doesn’t it?”

Petunia nodded. “I wouldn’t say anything,” she added in a hushed tone, “but it’s just so terribly _loud_ , barking at all hours! And you know it can’t possibly be sanitary to keep that great dirty thing coming and going in their house as it pleases. And of course, that’s their business, I wouldn’t bring it up, but you know Mrs down-at-number-12 is doing poorly, and with her husband away, and the _barking_ \--”

“Mm-hmm,” nodded the other quickly, “yes, terrible business, that - did you hear --?”

“Oooh, yes,” Petunia added, dropping the curtain and turning away from her kitchen window. “I certainly did. Pregnant again, is it?”

The other woman tittered behind her tea cup. “And her husband gone for twelve months with the navy, truly -”

“He didn’t receive leave when she went to London in September?”

“Well, that’s what she says,” murmured Mrs-at-Number-16, leaning conspiratorially closer.

Their voices faded out as they moved away from the kitchen window beneath which Harry was weeding the garden, but it wasn’t a conversation of much interest to him. He didn’t mind. He preferred it when it was quiet.

Harry liked the dog, in all honesty. It was a huge fawn-coloured mongrel with floppy lips and ears, something with a lot of mastiff in its spotted family history. It wasn’t quiet, no - it barked at strangers and occasionally at unfamiliar cars, and it did tend to upset the mailman. But, really, there was nothing terrible about it, and it had a very gentle temper.

Sometimes Harry liked to imagine that he had a dog, too, a big one that would chase Dudley away and keep him safe - but of course he didn’t, and he suspected that any dog that might have befriended him would find itself swiftly delivered to the pound.

Six months after this overheard conversation, the big dog was hit by a car.

Everybody claimed it was an unfamiliar one, that it had to be a stranger to the area, none of their neighbours would hurt the noisy beast, of course not.

Harry, who was engaged in yet more gardening at the time of the accident - if it was indeed an accident - had seen it play out in the dusk half-light, and he thought it looked a lot like the car that Mrs-at-Number-16’s husband drove to work. He didn’t share this thought with anybody, because it seemed unlikely to end well for him.

The dog, though - the car wasn’t going fast enough to smear it across the bitumen, but the collision did send the poor animal flying.

Harry was not surprised to learn that it had died. Sad, though.

Dudley, of course, thought it was cool and exciting, and cheerfully told the children it had belonged to that the dog was stupid to get run over like that.

Harry then told Dudley he was stupid, stupider than the dog, and Dudley shoved his face into the Dursleys’ front fence, and then Harry got yelled at because he might have damaged the paint.

So basically it was a Tuesday for Harry.

That night, the dog crawled out of its backyard grave and into bed with one of the children. It was no clean resurrection: the dog was all glazed eyes and dry, hanging tongue, with flies in its mouth and crushed ribs and one leg hanging on by a thread.

Harry was woken by the screaming of children.

It took three people to get the dog back into its shallow grave, and they had to cut it into pieces to do it. Uncle Vernon was among them, frightened and sweating as they laboured.

“What happened?” Dudley asked, peering down from the landing above the stairs. His mother clutched his shoulder, looking wan and distressed in her faded nightgown.

Harry, oddly, knew what had happened. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t really understand it all, but it all clicked together inside his head.

“Some kids playing a prank,” said Vernon vaguely and gruffly. Petunia, leaning over the bannister, relaxed at this white lie.

They retreated back to bed, and Vernon glowered at Harry over his paunch. “Not a word,” he said, purpling like he was too furious to even yell at him properly. “I’ll deal with you in the morning.”

Harry scampered back to his cupboard and tried not to breathe too loudly.

The beating he received the following morning was one he wouldn’t soon forget. The things Vernon howled at him in a shower of spittle and rage set him to trembling.

Harry could tell, looking at him, looking at Petunia’s white face and her clenched fists and her death grip on Dudley’s hand, that they were frightened. He didn’t understand, really, what he’d done, but he did know it was his fault. Somehow.

The people who had owned the dog moved away. One of their children had stopped talking, and Harry never found out if he started again.  
That was Harry’s fault, too.

He felt sick thinking about it.

“You can hardly blame them,” said Aunt Petunia darkly, peering at the removalist truck from between the blinds. Her gaze drifted to Harry. He swallowed.

He’d never meant anybody harm.

He didn’t even know _how_.

 

* * *

 

 

When Harry was eleven, he went to Hogwarts. Once there, he was reliably informed that his raising the dead was utterly impossible.

Hermione Granger was one of the most reliable sources of information in the castle, as far as Harry was concerned. She was dead clever and - well, maybe a bit bossy, and a bit of a know-it-all, but she meant well.

Besides, they’d accidentally fought a troll together.

It was hard not to feel connected to somebody after that.

“Everybody knows that,” Hermione told him with a sympathetic smile, pushing a book in his direction. It was a Saturday, but they were sitting in the library anyway. Hermione seemed thrilled to have somebody there with her. _Barmy_ , Ron had said, shaking his head.

“It was probably the dancing feet spell with the chicken, you know, _tarantallegra_. Malfoy used it on Neville last week,” she added, scrunching up her nose with distaste at the idea.

Harry looked at the book. It was large, thick, musty and looked about three hundred years old. It smelled sweetly of vanillin but he didn’t much want to read it. “There’s no, erm, nothing that would make anything like...”

“Like?” Hermione prompted, brows furrowing, when he didn’t continue.

“Have you seen _Dawn of the Dead_?” he asked, hunching his shoulders.

“Oh!” Hermione brightened. “You mean zombies. Yes, Professor Quirrell was talking about those...” she pulled out _another_ book and showed him. “They’re not caused by people’s magic, though. It’s just a thing that happens naturally sometimes. They think it might be some kind of disease, or, well - one writer thinks it happens to cemeteries where there’s been a lot of dark magic, although that doesn’t explain why they’re really only in South America - it’s really very fascinating, you know.”

She tucked her bushy hair behind one ear and dove face-first into the book, flipping through the pages until she had found the pages on undead and how to deal with them.

“So it’s not...?”

“Definitely not you,” she assured him. “There’s another kind...” she flipped several pages forward in her book, which seemed to be an encyclopaedia of the dark forces, “Inferi. They’re - they’re really dark magic, Harry. _Really_ dark. Nobody’s even seen one since You-Know-Who was defeated. You’d have to be doing really dark magic for that to happen. I don’t think you can do that by accident.”

“Right,” Harry agreed, relieved. “I don’t think I was doing any dark magic when I was six.”

“I shouldn’t think so, no,” she said, smiling slightly.

Good old Hermione, thought Harry.

 

* * *

 

When Harry was in detention with Draco Malfoy in the Forbidden Forest, he found the body of a unicorn.

It was beautiful in its way: graceful, with long slender legs and hair that was shining pearly-white even in death.

A hooded figure detached itself from the shadows of the forest to drink blood from the unicorn, and Malfoy freaked out and ran away screaming, hot on the heels of Hagrid’s huge dog.

Harry couldn’t move at all for fear, and as he stood, transfixed and terrified --

Well, it couldn’t have happened, really. Stress, fear and horror made him see things. That happened, sometimes.

And then pain unlike anything he’d felt before lanced through his head and Harry was struggling to breathe through it, and the black-cloaked person was gliding toward him with the hiss of silk over the leaves.

Everything got very confused then for a while, with the mad rush of centaur hooves and arguing voices and Hagrid’s sudden intervention. Firenze was solemn and bright, and he looked from Bane to the unicorn and back again with terrible focus. Harry felt the weight of his attention like a physical thing.

“So all I’ve got to wait for now,” Harry said feverishly, when he later found himself pacing madly in the common room, “is for Snape to steal the Stone and then Voldemort will be able to come and finish me off... Well, I s’pose Bane’ll be happy,” he muttered, still shaking with dissipating adrenalin.

Hermione tried her best to comfort him with logic and hearsay, which Harry appreciated, even though Ron remained sitting there flinching every time Harry mentioned the V-word.

The sky had turned light by the time they stopped speaking, and they retired to bed with sore throats and sandpapery eyes.

Despite all their discussion, never once did Harry mention the feeling he’d had when he saw the dead unicorn lift its head.

“It didn’t happen,” he whispered to his pillow. “It’s not possible.”

Not even in the magical world.

* * *

 

In general, Harry didn’t have to challenge that belief very often. Not until the end of his second year.

He was high on the sense of his own victory. Dobby was free, Malfoy was thwarted and angry as a pit viper, Ginny was safe - and he was going to the feast.

Everybody was in their pyjamas, and no sooner had he entered the Great Hall than Hermione came pelting toward him. “You solved it!” she exulted, and caught him in a huge hug. “You solved it!”

He was so glad to see her, safe and alive and distinctly unpetrified. He crushed her to him, ignoring how gross he was with dirt and other, less pleasant things. “You’re okay,” he said, and, well, of course he’d known she would be but -- but he’d been afraid for her. Afraid and sad and grieving, and now relief left him weak-kneed and lightheaded. Ron looked much the same.

“Of course,” she said, looking fondly at Harry and Ron. “Truthfully I don’t even remember most of it.”

“Probably a good thing,” Harry said, thinking of the Basilisk. It really was a thing of nightmares - and as far as Harry was concerned he was happy for it to _stay_ in his nightmares.

Hagrid turned up after three o’clock in the morning, thumping Harry and Ron so heavily on their backs that they stumbled, and it was good to see him again, too.

The atmosphere was one of celebration and joy, right up until the screaming started.

At first it just sounded as though the excitement and the late hour had gotten the best of somebody, causing a sudden rise in the yelling - but then it moved like a wave through the students, heads turning, voices gasping, shrieks of fear and shock.

Harry turned his head and the happy smile fell immediately from his face.

Through the doors of the Great Hall the basilisk slithered, huge and terrible. Her fang was broken, her eyes blinded by Fawkes’s razor beak. Her scales were shining beneath the warm orange glow of the candles.

Students scattered, yelling and screaming.

“Come on, Harry,” Hermione said, tugging on him, but he didn’t move.

He was transfixed.

“Harry,” Hermione insisted, looking fearfully between him and the basilisk.

“ _Stop_ ,” he said to the snake. The Great Hall fell silent at the soft hiss of parseltongue.

She stopped and lowered her head. They could all see the wound in her head was black with coagulating blood.

She was definitely dead.

Harry felt his stomach clench in terror. The basilisk couldn’t - she wasn’t --

He didn’t know what he was thinking. All he knew was she raised her head again - the horror made him cower inside, this terrible dead thing bowing its head to him - and her blind eyes fixed upon him.

He swayed.

“ _Harry_ ,” Hermione hissed, and shoved him behind her. He stumbled, and then it was, for a heart-stopping second, Hermione - tiny, bushy-haired, clever Hermione - standing between him and a great filthy murderous undead snake, trembling and brave --

Light shot from Dumbledore’s wand, and the basilisk stilled.

It seemed to fight for a second, and then it slumped to the floor, dead once more.

Students’ voices rose in panic all around them. “I knew he was the heir,” muttered somebody, and Harry flinched. Hermione clutched his arm, and then Ron was there, too, glowering out at the crowd.

The three of them stood in the middle of a clearing with the dead basilisk. Students crowded around the edges of that invisible circle, staring and muttering.

“Enough!” Dumbledore’s voice rose over the crowd, restoring, if not order, at least relative silence.

He looked gravely upon the scene from where he stood behind the high table, and walked slowly around it until there was nothing between him and the students. They made a path for him as he approached the body of the snake.

“Harry,” he murmured, pausing as he passed, “perhaps it would be best if you were to meet me in my office.”

Ron opened his mouth to protest, but Dumbledore held up one hand. “You may come with him, Mr Weasley, Miss Granger,” he said rather kindly, and then moved forward once more to inspect the basilisk.

“Return to your seats,” he directed the students, his voice fading as Harry hurried from the Hall. He didn’t think he wanted to be there anymore anyway.

“They can’t think you did that,” Ron said incredulously, looking over his shoulder in bewildered shock.

“They can and they do,” said Harry grimly. His feelings of victory and good cheer had vanished, and now he was sick to his stomach. The chicken - the dog - the unicorn - was it all him?

Ron gave the password to the gargoyle beneath the headmaster’s office and they all headed up the spiral staircase. Harry’s head was awhirl.

“Harry," Hermione said, closing the door behind her, “I’m sure Dumbledore knows it can’t possibly be you. Raising a person as an inferius takes years of practice in the dark arts,” she said reasonably. “All of the books say so. I can’t even imagine the kind of studying you’d need to raise something as big and as powerfully magical as a basilisk - it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Unfortunately, Miss Granger,” sighed Dumbledore from the office door, “the books are not always correct. Or,” he added, when she opened her mouth to protest, “perhaps it may be better to say that writers make generalisations to simplify certain topics for general understanding.”

Hermione looked like this suggestion had offended her core beliefs. All of them. All at once.

“It is true,” he said heavily, “that for most wizards the raising of even the smallest dead thing takes a great deal of practice and effort. Grindelwald, even,” he said with a pensive, weighty expression, “exhausted himself trying to raise an army of inferi.”

“Grindelwald?” Harry frowned. He’d heard that name somewhere before...

Hermione and Ron both looked at him like he’d grown a second head.

“Blimey, Harry,” Ron said. “ _Grindelwald_. He was a dark wizard. He’s... he’s famous.”

“Oh,” said Harry, feeling a little silly.

“Sort of like not knowing who Hitler was,” Hermione said, wrinkling her nose at him.

“Hitler?” Ron repeated. “Who’s that?”

Hermione and Harry shared a look that said clearly that they weren’t touching that topic.

“Anyway, Harry, Grindelwald was in last year’s Defence text,” she said, raising her eyebrows at him.

Ron looked as though that was news to him, too, but Harry declined to comment. “Sorry.”

Dumbledore looked upon this exchange with a strange blankness, which gave way to weariness when their attention returned to him. “What the books commonly available to students don’t tell us,” Dumbledore said, rubbing the bridge of his nose as though he had a terrible headache, “is that occasionally somebody is born with an... aptitude. Much like the speaking of parseltongue, or the abilities of a metamorphmagus --”

“A _what_?”

“A witch or wizard who can change their appearance without a spell or potion,” Hermione said, sounding as usual as though she’d swallowed a textbook. “It’s a really rare innate ability, like parseltongue.”

“As usual, Miss Granger is quite correct,” Dumbledore said, giving her an encouraging smile. “Unfortunately, the gift you have displayed this evening is not quite as benign as that of a metamorphmagus or a parselmouth.”

What, Harry wondered, could possibly be less benign than being able to speak to snakes?

“You’re what the wizarding world calls an _animator_ , Harry,” said Dumbledore.

“What does that mean?” Hermione interjected. She looked thrilled to be learning something new. Harry wished he shared her enthusiasm.

“To ‘animate’ means to bring movement to something or cause it to appear life-like, but our use of the word ‘animator’ has its roots in an older meaning of the word, where _animatum_ intersects with _animus_ ; the spirit, the mind, the life-force. It is a particular and specific branch of magic that deals with giving life and animation to dead creatures.”

There was a shocked pause.

“You mean he can resurrect the dead?” Ron blurted. He turned wild eyes on Harry.

Dumbledore was already shaking his head. “That is impossible, Mr Weasley,” he said gravely. “An animator can raise dead creatures, but the personality doesn’t linger. They’re mindless things that follow their master’s will. The mind, the soul, is missing.”

He looked gravely at Harry. “Harry, it is vitally important that you understand how extremely dangerous this is. I could wish you would not be burdened with this as well, but...”

“Sorry, Professor, but - how is it dangerous?” Hermione asked. “They’re already dead, aren’t they? How can he hurt them?”

“It’s not dangerous to the bodies, Miss Granger, you’re quite right - but it is dangerous to Mr Potter.”

She stilled and watched attentively.

“Dark magic - all forms of dark magic - are corruptive and addictive, and they feed into each other, Miss Granger. I meant what I said, Harry,” he transferred his attention to Harry, “when I told you that there are a great many superficial similarities between you and Tom Riddle. Dark lords do not start out evil." There was a terrible warning in his voice, and something in his face that spoke of long experience.

Harry’s gut clenched. “But..."

“As far as addiction goes, one form of dark magic will feel very much the same as another. That is why it is _imperative_ that you gain control of your accidental magic. You must. You _must_.”

Harry swallowed. “But -- I don’t even know I’m doing it,” he said, feeling panic flutter in his gut. “How do I stop it?”

“It’s like any other accidental magic,” Dumbledore said, relaxing back into his seat. The twinkle was back in his eye, and he smiled gently. “An effort of will and strong self-control is all that’s required. After this year I have every confidence that you can do that.”

There was a long pause. “Right,” said Harry uncertainly.

Dumbledore clapped his hands. “Right then. Pip-pip, off to bed with you. You’ve all had a very stressful evening!”

And he ushered them out of his office.

“Right,” said Ron, looking at him with wild eyes, “so all Harry has to do is just... not want to raise the dead,” he said weakly.

“Er,” said Harry, uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “I s’pose so,” he agreed.

Ron clapped him on the shoulder and strode forward. “Right, well, I’m going to see Ginny before bed,” he said.

“Oh, of course,” Hermione nodded, and they let him go.

“But I didn’t want to raise them in the first place,” Harry said to Hermione, quiet and soft, as the gargoyle leapt into place behind them and Ron’s red hair disappeared down the corridor.

She gave him a helpless look.


	2. Chapter 2

The rest of the final term of the year passed slowly. Although the Chamber business had been resolved and Lucius Malfoy had been kicked off the board of governors, Harry didn’t really find himself enjoying the sunshine outside.

Mutters and awkward silences followed him through the school corridors and people stepped cautiously around him quite as though it was _his_ gaze that was deadly! Harry, Hermione and Ron learned quickly that there wasn’t a lot they could do to stop people from believing that Harry was the Heir of Slytherin all along - they even seemed to think his dramatic rescue of Ginny had somehow been part of his convoluted plot.

In fact, about the only people who didn’t believe the stupid rumour were the Slytherins themselves.

“This is ridiculous,” Draco Malfoy said sulkily, when the Gryffindor-Slytherin group was approaching their last Potions class of the term and found that they had to side-step a trembling Hufflepuff muggleborn while he stared, frozen, at Harry. “As if _Potter_ could be the Heir of Slytherin. He’s not even _in_ Slytherin.”

“For once,” muttered Harry quietly to Ron, glancing over his shoulder at the frozen frightened-year and his glaring friends, “I agree with him.”

Ahead of them, Malfoy’s shoulder twitched.

With exams cancelled, most of the classes had a strangely cheerful atmosphere, but this was not at all the case in potions class. Snape tended to behave as though their potions would all explode upon exposure to the faintest whiff of happiness, really. So while it should have been a relaxing revision of what was learnt that year, Snape had apparently decided to get a head start on next year’s curriculum.

“So those of you with no more sense than mountain trolls might avoid a failing grade,” he explained, with a rather pointed stare in Harry’s direction.

Harry remained preoccupied with thoughts of other, frankly more important, things. Like how he was supposed to avoid accidental magic - the whole point, he gathered, was that it was _accidental_.

Accidental magic Harry had done before had been a result of _wanting_ something - safety, security, not to be humiliated, to heal faster. Pretty basic, human sorts of things, he thought. But he’d had absolutely no desire to see that basilisk ever again - and it didn’t even make sense that he’d have enough magical power to raise the monster! He was pretty certain that he couldn’t even _levitate_ the whole thing. How could he possibly have managed to raise it from the dead without noticing?

“Harry,” hissed Ron.

Harry blinked.

A lacewing fly - dead and twenty-one days stewed - was crawling up the side of their cauldron. Another was struggling in their base.

“I -- I don’t --”

“ _Stop it_ ,” Ron whispered urgently, glancing at Snape - who was explaining that Malfoy had chopped his valerian roots _just so._

“How?” Harry wondered.

Ron looked helplessly at him.

The lacewing fly made it to the top of the cauldron, perched itself on the edge and spread its torn wings, flapping them to dry them. If it took off, somebody was bound to notice that one of their ingredients was flapping around Snape’s classroom.

Harry smacked it with his ladle.

The clang reverberated through the silent classroom and Snape whirled. “Potter!”

Harry winced. “Er,” he said.

“What possessed you to make that racket in my classroom, Potter?” Snape wondered, stalking closer. His eyes flicked over their cauldron but he didn’t seem to see anything too spectacularly amiss.

Harry said nothing. At the very least they were too late in the school year for taking points to have any purpose.

“Very well. Fifteen inches on the importance of decorum in the classroom. Leave it on my desk tomorrow.” He turned back to the rest of the class. “That stirring motion is _not_ widdershins, Brown!”

That potions lesson seemed to set the tone for the rest of the holidays.

Harry, who was accustomed to living with the Dursleys, dealt with the yelling and shrieking with relative equanimity. His wand and broom and cloak were taken from him, and he had to steal back his school text books so he could complete his homework, but he managed that successfully. There was a brief, loud debacle when Ron tried to call him using the telephone and Uncle Vernon flipped his lid at being contacted by a wizard, but really, all those things were pretty much average for the Dursleys.

What was actually troubling Harry was that, as though knowing about it had unlocked some secret store of the obnoxious magic within him, every time he turned around he found _something dead looking at him._

And often they were _looking_ at him, too, as though they had enough sentience left to direct their attention to him.

First there was a cockroach he _could not kill_ , no matter how hard or with what he hit it. It kept moving, squirming, even though its innards were on the outside. Eventually he resorted to catching it in a paper towel and throwing it in the outside bin, and he could only hope it didn’t somehow get inside again.

Next was a common mouse that looked like it had been caught in a mousetrap from its broken little body. Then a sparrow with a crushed skull.

It seemed Harry couldn’t go anywhere without dead things rising up to greet him, and nature wasn’t usually kind enough to leave them preserved and clean. He went to bed every evening with visions of dead things dancing behind his eyelids.

When Harry did sleep, he dreamed. He dreamed of Slytherin’s basilisk, rising huge and terrible in the Great Hall with its eyes stabbed out, one broken fang and a hole through its head. He dreamed of it bowing to him, and the way everybody turned from him when it hissed _master._

When he woke, it was usually still dark, and he had to turn all the lights on to assure himself he was not still in the Chamber of Secrets, not still dying from Tom Riddle‘s poisonous plots. And then the day again, with its strange parade of deceased vermin, which Harry could no more prevent than he could dance the lindy hop.

“It’s driving me mad,” he informed Hedwig, stroking her soft feathers. She bit his finger, but not hard enough to do any real damage.

He mostly succeeded in keeping the dead things from anybody’s notice, although he wasn’t quite as lucky with his regular magic that summer.

Harry didn’t mind gardening, as a rule, which was probably lucky for him because Aunt Petunia much preferred looking at her garden to working on it. On this particular day, Harry actually hadn’t realised that he was no longer alone in the garden.

In the summer holidays Dudley usually took any opportunity to sleep in quite late, and so once Vernon left for work it was just Harry and Aunt Petunia about the house until noon. Harry didn’t like Aunt Petunia, but she was usually the least awful of his awful relatives.

Unfortunately, on that day, Dudley had hauled himself out of bed sometime before eleven am. Harry did not hear him coming outside, lost in his own world while he pulled weeds and carefully avoided the thorns on Petunia’s rose bushes.

All Harry new was that he was suddenly cold and dripping. He yelped and jumped in shock.

The situation became clearer to him when Dudley started laughing loudly, trying to keep the stream of water directed at Harry just so, for maximum soaking value.

The hose flew uselessly to one side when Dudley bellowed in sudden pain and flung the hose away. There was a second’s confused pause while Harry tried to get the water off his glasses using his sopping shirt (an exercise in futility), and then Dudley began screaming and bolted back into the house, where he fell into hysterics, clutching his ankle and yelling at his mother.

Harry blinked.

“Turn that water off, would you,” murmured a sleepy voice. “I was quite happy in my sunbeam.”

Harry started and it took him a few moments to realise that the voice was a hiss. He couldn’t even see the snake, but on the basis that he didn’t much enjoy snake bites (which, following the basilisk incident, he now knew for certain), he got up and went to turn the hose off.

“Sorry,” he told it quietly. It came out in English because he couldn’t see any snake to be talking to.

It made a noise that didn’t really translate, but definitely sounded grumpy. The sounds finally led Harry to the snake, where it was struggling out of the watery dirt amidst long grass. It had been too hard-packed to turn immediately to mud, so the snake was subject to watery run-off.

Inside the house, Harry could hear Petunia yelling tearfully into the phone. She seemed fully convinced that her baby boy was going to die.

“Hey,” said Harry, crouching down. “It’s probably not good to stay out here.”

The snake looked up. He was a common adder, so Dudley probably wasn’t going to die. Pity.

He tasted the air. “It’s rare to hear a monkey speak a civilised language...” he murmured. “You’ve been bitten by a basilisk,” he added, and then he leaned in even closer and flicked his tongue toward Harry’s skin. “And you’re a corpse raiser.”

“I didn’t actually do any of those things on purpose,” Harry told him flatly, “and I’m only telling you - you need to get out of here before somebody comes to kill you.”

“Kill me?” the adder asked, flicking his tongue at Harry again. “You would let them?” he hissed, sounding affronted. “They’re _monkeys_!”

“I’m a - a human," Harry said, catching himself before he could repeat 'monkey’. He was pretty certain that was rude.

“Impossible,” said the adder flatly. “But you’re damned odd looking, for a snake, so I can see why you’d be confused. But blood will show, you know; you’d never turn one of us over to a _monkey_.”

“Erm,” Harry said uncertainly. “Well...”

It was hard, being faced with a sentient creature, to tell him he was going to just let him die. He frowned. “I guess... I probably wouldn’t let them have you,” he agreed, “but it would cause a lot of trouble for me if they caught you. They don’t much like me,” he added.

The adder made a derisive sound. “Of course they don’t. You’re a snake, they are monkeys. It’s only natural. Do mice nest with owls?”

There was a commotion inside the house, and Petunia slammed the door open. “I’m riding with Dudley in the ambulance,” she barked at Harry, too distracted to pay much attention to what he was doing. “Have this cleaned up before we get back, and whatever you do _don’t_ track mud on my clean floors!”

And then she turned and was gone again, clattering through the house and cooing to her precious baby boy.

The snake raised his head to follow her retreat with his eyes, tongue flickering out to taste the air. “Foul,” he hissed. “I think I’ll move on anyway,” he went on, returning his gaze to Harry. “Either bite them or leave them, snakeling, but don’t stay in their nest too long.”

And then he slithered away through the grass. He was astonishingly fast for such a small thing, but then Harry supposed that was how snakes were. They struck fast and ran away.

Harry did, in fact, get the garden more or less sorted out by the time the Dursleys returned from the emergency room. All three of them returned just as he was finished cleaning up the bits of the floor where he’d been unable to avoid trailing mud.

He ducked into the laundry to put the mop away and found himself hunching in the dark there, waiting for the Dursleys to pass by so he could get upstairs and back to his room without actually having to see them.

“Overtaxed health system, hah!” Uncle Vernon was saying as they came in, his voice loud and booming in the hall. “I told them I don’t pay my tax so they can mess about with these _foreigners_. I’m a British citizen.” Harry could almost hear him puff up with this last statement.

“You were very heroic, dear,” Petunia simpered. “I don’t know what kind of care our Dudders would have received if you hadn’t been there to set them right.”

Harry rolled his eyes. Everybody knew that bites from little adders like that one almost never really did much damage unless you were a mouse. Dudley was so big Harry was almost surprised the bite had done anything at all.

“Does it still hurt very much, Dudley?” Vernon asked gruffly as their voices trailed away further into the house, and Dudley’s whimpering answer was far enough away to be indecipherable.

Harry crept quietly up the stairs and into his own bedroom while his aunt and uncle settled Dudley down in front of the television with a great deal of fuss and ceremony. He knew they wouldn’t call him for dinner if he missed it, but he’d actually nicked a couple pieces of bread and some canned fish when he’d come in from outside and wasn’t very hungry - not hungry enough to endure their company unless he really had to, anyway.

Harry took the opportunity to work on some of his homework. As long as he was being silent, he doubted any of his relatives would come looking for him.

Midnight brought with it a broom servicing kit from Hermione, a pocket sneakoscope from Ron and a very peculiar biting book from Hagrid.

He eyed the form letter from McGonagall uncertainly. He wasn’t at all certain how he’d persuade either Vernon or Petunia to sign it...

Well, that was a problem for later. As it stood, Harry went to bed feeling pleased and satisfied for the first time in a number of weeks.

Of course, the next day he found out that Aunt Marge was coming to visit, and every last good feeling drained out of him, leaving him queasy with foreboding instead. He nibbled listlessly at his toast and was totally unsurprised when Vernon snapped at him for being ungrateful toward them for taking on the huge burden of feeding him.

Compared to Dudley, he wondered how they even noticed whatever burden Harry was upon their food budget.

He entertained a brief, powerful fantasy of telling them that he could, in fact, feed and clothe and house himself quite readily with his own inheritance and thank-you-and-goodbye, but he knew he’d get into no end of trouble at school for that kind of behaviour. He was pretty sure he was stuck here for the foreseeable future, excepting his time at Hogwarts.

He still clearly remembered the last occasion upon which Aunt Marge had visited, when her bulldog Ripper had chased him up a tree and kept him there until after midnight. He didn’t much care to revisit that situation.

Still, this was a good opportunity to ask about his Hogsmeade form, since they’d want him to behave for Aunt Marge.

He cornered Uncle Vernon before he went to pick the horrid woman up at the station, and showed him the form. There was some back and forth, and a few threats to ‘knock the stuffing out’ of Harry, but eventually they came to the agreement that, pending Harry’s good behaviour in the time that she was present, Vernon would sign his form.

Aunt Marge’s visit wasn’t as bad as Harry had been expecting.

It was _worse_.

Aunt Marge was a strong, heavy-bodied woman with a florid face and a stern glower, and she arrived with a suitcase in one hand and a bulldog in the other.

She treated Harry like a kind of obnoxiously talkative furniture, but she insisted that he be present at very nearly all times. When he wasn’t doing chores he was with Aunt Marge, who delighted in what she called 'keeping an eye on the delinquent’ and he called 'being a torturously nosy, vicious old bat’. She harangued him continually, barking questions about how often he got caned and whether or not he was appropriately appreciative of the fine schooling and home environment given to him by the Dursleys.

He mostly passed the time by agreeing with her while he thought about something - anything - else.

Marge spent much of her time cooing and fussing over her ‘nephy-poo,’ telling him how courageous and strong he must have been to survive his snakebite and Dudley, who had never been seriously injured in his life, lapped up the overwrought sympathy like an exotic and delicious delicacy.

Harry, being forced to spend all his time waiting on Aunt Marge, truly struggled with avoiding her seeing his obnoxiously unpredictable ‘talent’ for accidentally raising the dead. He lost track of how many times he casually trod upon the wriggling body of a dead bug or spider that had crawled out from Merlin-knows-where to greet him, hoping it would stop wriggling against his foot even as he obscured it from view.

On the last morning of Aunt Marge’s visit, Harry woke with a yelp to a sharp pain in the shell of his ear. “Hedwig!”

She was shuffling her feathers nervously and waddling awkwardly about one side of his bed, so Harry snatched up his glasses to see what the matter was.

Hedwig had, with towering disgust, given up her perch to a pigeon with matted feathers and a broken neck.

Harry groaned and slumped back to his pillows.

With an offended noise, Hedwig pecked him again.

“Sorry,” he told her.

He had no idea what to do about the bloody pigeon, so he scooped it gingerly up (releasing a cloud of small insects from its body - delightful) and dumped it out his window and onto the nature strip below. It was barely half six, so nobody would be outside to see him.

Then he closed his window and pointed toward the perch for Hedwig, who gave him another offended hoot.

A second later, Harry flinched as the pidgeon went thud against his window pane. It left a streak of... something... as it slid back down.

He covered his face with his hands.

He’d had no idea there was even this much wildlife in Little Whinging. He supposed it usually stayed out of sight, and only appeared right now because - oh yes - he was accidentally calling it up from the dead.

“Hedwig,” he said, through his hands, “I need you to take a letter to Hermione. Can you do that?”

He felt her silent movement through the room and the gentle preening of his hair. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

He scrawled a letter to Hermione asking if she had any books or - anything, actually - on suppressing accidental magic. His letter was barely coherent at this time of the morning, but he at least remembered to wish her a good holiday in France in his post-script, so he didn’t seem too entirely selfish.

“Go on,” he said to Hedwig, who took the letter with good grace and winged away when he opened the window. He closed it again immediately after her. When she returned she’d tap on the glass, and he didn’t want anymore ‘visitors’.

Not least because dead things _smelled_.

Of course, that night was an unmitigated disaster.

And he'd gotten so close to getting through summer, too.

Aunt Marge got rather tipsy, and while her huge face was growing steadily redder she continued the same line of discussion that had so thrilled her for days. And since Harry had very little recourse to make her stop, and the Dursleys weren’t really inclined to, her wit ran long indeed.

Beat people who deserved it, she said, sneering at him. Her implication that he be drowned like a purebred puppy that came out with the wrong markings was not lost on Harry, although he did his best to ignore it.

Bad blood, she informed them, and Harry was strangely reminded of the adder in the garden. _Blood will show, you know_ , he had said, and Harry had a strange, detached moment of clarity. The adder, for all his peculiarities, was right: these were not his people, he did not belong here.

Something went _thump_ against the outside wall of the house. There was a nervous pause but nothing much seemed to happen, and the conversation regrettably continued in this same vein.

He looked across the table at Aunt Marge, where she was refilling her glass and sloshing brandy over Aunt Petunia’s table cloth.

The things she said about his father’s being an unemployed wastrel hardly registered, but then she was saying, “-they go and get themselves killed in a car crash (drunk, I expect)--” and Harry found himself abruptly upon his feet.

“They didn’t die in a car crash,” he said in a hard voice, and although he found himself trembling with some overwhelming emotion he couldn’t possibly have said what it was.

There was a scraping sound as something clawed restlessly at the window. Aunt Petunia flinched, her eyes wide, and Uncle Vernon glanced nervously outside.

“You, boy,” he snarled at Harry. “I think it’s time for bed. Go on --”

“They died in a car crash,” hissed Marge, getting laboriously - and a little unsteadily - to her feet, “and left you to be a burden --”

The window pane broke in a clatter of glass.

“ _Boy_ ,” snarled Vernon, raising one meaty fist toward him.

Two pigeons and a bat, one snake, a score of bugs and three rats came pouring into the house, and they rushed Aunt Marge in a swarm of matted fur and feathers and the terrible sweet reek of decay.

She shrieked as the bat became tangled in her hair, bellowed and flailed while the pigeons scratched at her. Roaches and spiders crawled over her shoes and swarmed up the table legs, and a rat hurled itself at her knees.

Harry stared, unable to look away from the scene.

All of the muggles were screaming, even Dudley, whose attention had finally been drawn away from the television in the dining room.

Ripper the bulldog came skidding into the room, howling and barking like a mad thing, and Harry was not surprised when the dead garden snake turned on him, hissing and fangs bared.

Harry felt strangely detached, as it happened. It was as though all the feeling had rushed from him, and now he watched through a haze of blissful unconcern and unaccountable clarity.

Right.

Well, he certainly couldn’t stay here.

He went to the hallway and got his trunk, barely noticing when the locked cupboard door burst magically open at his touch, and went upstairs with calm alacrity to retrieve his books and the gifts he’d received from his friends.

His Hogsmeade letter lay discarded on his desk and, after a second, Harry smiled and scooped it up before he returned downstairs.

Uncle Vernon burst out of the dining room, red-faced and blotchy. He looked terrible, but Harry couldn’t feel any of the trembling nervous fear he usually felt.

“YOU,” he bellowed at Harry. “COME BACK IN HERE -- !”

Another window burst somewhere deeper in the house. The screaming intensified, and all Harry felt was a hot rush of satisfaction and a resurgence of that blissful calm.

Harry drew his wand from his trunk and pointed it at Uncle Vernon. “I’m going,” he said in a peculiarly calm voice. “I’m leaving, and I don’t think I’ll be back.”

Vernon was not really listening. “YOU COME BACK IN HERE AND FIX THIS,” he shouted.

A rat scrambled through the doorway and attached itself to Uncle Vernon’s ankle. He bellowed.

“I don’t know how,” Harry admitted, “and I don’t think I would if I did. Before I leave,” he said, “I’ll need you to sign this.”

Vernon looked up from where he was clutching his ankle and his face went purple with rage. “IF YOU THINK I’M _EVER_ SIGNING ANYTHING FOR YOUR FREAK SCHOOL --”

Harry touched his wand to his uncle’s throat. “I’ve already broken the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry,” he said.

Vernon met his eyes for just a second, and then he scrambled for a pen. “Go. Get out -- _go_. Don’t ever come back,” he snarled, shoving the letter at Harry.

"All right." Harry tucked his letter away and closed his trunk.

The next moment he was out in the dark. The air was cool and the shrieking of Aunt Marge and Aunt Petunia was curiously muffled. He heaved his heavy trunk behind him and began to walk.

It wasn’t until three streets later that the rush of heady calm from the dark magic left him and Harry sagged and slumped down to sit on a low wall.

He had no idea what he was doing and no clue where to go from here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally got back to this. Sorry for the wait! Don't forget to drop me a comment if you liked it. :)


	3. Chapter 3

Magnolia Crescent was just as dull after dark as it was during the day, which was a thing Harry was grateful for. His heart was going hard enough without any added excitement, thank you very much. He stared at the Hogsmeade letter in his hand, wondering what on earth had possessed him. How had he been so convinced everything was going to be okay?

He’d broken the Decree very badly. _Very_ badly, using what was undeniably dark magic to attack a muggle. Forget going to Hogsmeade, he was definitely going to be expelled.

Actually he suspected he’d be pretty lucky if he wasn’t incarcerated, considering. He wondered if there were aurors looking for him.

There was nobody out and about right now, but Harry knew that by the first light of morning he’d seem particularly suspicious in this sleepy upper-middle class neighbourhood. Doubtless somebody would call the police, and then he’d have to come up with some kind of lie as to why a thirteen year old boy was hanging about outside all night with a broomstick and his luggage full of spell books and owl treats.

“Stop panicking,” he muttered to himself. He’d been calm and cool-headed earlier, but it had all vanished between Privet Drive and here, and now he was adrift and sort of frightened.

Where was he to go? Ron was in Egypt and Hermione was in France. He rubbed his forehead.

He could go to London, pick up some money and vanish, outcast, to the edges of wizarding society, he supposed. Or, well, no - maybe muggle society, since he knew the Ministry could track the use of underage magic.

And wasn’t that an awful thought? He could see the letter now: _Dear Mr Potter, you are hereby expelled for having raised the dead. The aurors will arrive shortly to snap your wand for the performance of very dark magic. Good day!_

Still. Muggle society. The exchange rate wasn’t bad. Perhaps he could get his money changed and disappear to somewhere else, somewhere they spoke English but far, far away? Australia, maybe...

With this admittedly terrible plan in mind - he was sure he’d flesh it out later, as he was going along - he knelt to dig through his trunk for his invisibility cloak. He’d hardly get into Gringotts to get his money changed if he was recognised by every witch and wizard in London, obviously.

Harry paused, feeling the strange sensation that somebody was watching him.

He wrapped his fingers more tightly around his wand and looked up, peering suspiciously about - but the night air was still and silent. There wasn’t even a rustle or a breath to indicate another person.

There was a sudden hissing voice by his shoe. “You again. Did you get sick of those monkeys after all?”

Harry jumped and very nearly landed on the snake, who darted away and hissed a warning.

“Sorry, sorry,” Harry said, lowering his wand and taking a step back. Unless he was very mistaken, it was the same adder who’d bitten Dudley. “I didn’t see you there. I thought you’d gone? Isn’t it late for you to be out?”

“I am gone,” said the adder. “I found a new garden. The monkey who lives there’s old and she doesn’t dig in her grass or plants. There’s plenty of rats.” He sounded satisfied.

“Oh,” said Harry, and then, not knowing what else to say, “that’s good.”

“It is, rather,” the snake agreed. He gave the snaky equivalent of a yawn and hissed tiredly. Then: “Are you going to stay here, too? It could be convenient, a snake with opposable thumbs,” he said speculatively.

“Er,” said Harry, looking at his hands. “No, I was... thinking about heading to --” there was no Parseltongue word for ‘London,’ he realised, frowning. “Away,” he said finally. “I hurt one of the muggles,” he added, shifting on his feet.

“Good,” said the adder. “Better to bite them before they bite you.” His tongue flickered then, and he raised his head. “Dog,” he said.

“Dog?” Harry repeated stupidly, frowning at the snake.

“ _That_ dog,” said the adder, with a tone of voice that sounded a lot like rolling his eyes. Then he stopped, stilling completely until it was almost hard to see in the half-light of the moon and a distant, flickering street lamp.

“Bugger, it’s huge,” he added, and surged up the low wall in a series of writhing wriggles. “Let me up, let me up,” he hissed.

Harry squinted into the darkness, but he honestly couldn’t see anything. He imagined most average-sized dogs would seem huge from a tiny snake’s perspective. He held out one arm and let the adder coil around it. Harry could feel his scales shifting and contracting against his skin as it made its way to his shoulder.

He wasn’t sure he liked the feeling of its dry, cool scales against his neck. He felt very vulnerable like that.

“If it wants to fight,” said the snake seriously, “you get me in range, I’ll bite it, and we both run.”

“I still can’t even see it,” Harry pointed out. It came out in English because he wasn’t looking at the adder. But that was a lie, actually - he could see something moving between the wall and the garage of the house across the street, and then a huge, ragged dog moved into the moonlight.

Harry’s fingers tightened around his wand. The dog was huge. _Really_ huge. He swallowed nervously and took a step back.

It turned out to be not nearly as scary as it seemed, actually. With a wagging tail, the dog came to him and rolled over and snuffled at his shoes, and then quite abruptly Harry was subject to a huge, wet dog kiss.

“What is it _doing_?” demanded the adder in alarm. He opened his mouth and made a terrible warning hiss.

The dog jerked back, leaving Harry slightly drooled upon but no worse off.

“It’s all right,” said Harry, which didn’t seem to calm the adder at all. He turned his head to look at him. “It’s all right,” he repeated, this time in parseltongue.

The dog stilled, one ear cocked. It was giving Harry a very strange look, one which Harry could not quite interpret.

“At least the dog’s alive,” Harry added to the adder, keeping one careful eye on the huge black beast. “I’m getting really sick of dead animals.”

“You what,” said the snake, rather flatly, and Harry took a few moments to explain everything that had happened to the adder, even as he kept an eye on the dog sniffing his trunk.

Harry was selfishly pleased to have somebody to talk to about this, even though he knew internally that there was nothing wise about siting in the middle of a dark street conversing in parseltongue. Nevertheless, stress was straining his voice by the time he’d finished, and he felt that weird tightness in his throat that said he was edging toward tears.

He blinked his eyes until he didn’t feel like crying anymore. The dog made a whimper in the back of his throat. He came close to snuffle - more gently - at Harry’s face again, and Harry buried his hands in the dog’s dark fur. He didn’t smell great, but he was warm and friendly and oddly comforting.

“I have no idea what you are,” the adder informed Harry after a few moments. “I know about monkey magic - flashy stuff, mostly - but I’ve never heard of a thing like you. I met a runespoor once,” he added thoughtfully. “They have very strange magic. But you’ve too few heads.”

“I don’t think I’m a runespoor,” said Harry wryly.

“No,” said the adder. “Runespoors are clever.”

“Now I’m being sassed by a snake,” Harry said to the dog, quietly, in English, prompting a soft snort from the beast. The great black dog settled his jaw on Harry’s shoulder - the other shoulder, far from his scaly friend - and heaved a huge sigh.

“You’re a stray, I guess,” Harry said thoughtfully, tugging a burr from the dog’s dirty fur. He felt for a collar and found none. “You’re awfully skinny if you’re not.”

He heaved a sigh, checked his cracked wristwatch, and stood. If he was quick and careful he could get on a bus before the last one left for the evening. “I’m going to -- away," he said to the snake, carefully trying to disentangle it from his arm and shoulder.

The snake sniffed, stiffened and tightened his coils. “I am not a pet,” he informed Harry, “but I have determined that you desperately need supervision, and clearly none of these monkeys are capable of providing it.”

Harry blinked.

What would it hurt, he wondered. The adder was small and quiet and gave him somebody to talk to, and Harry... well, rather selfishly, he liked having somebody to share secrets with. Even if it was just a snake.

And even if the snake thought he was too stupid to exist on his own.

“Fine,” said Harry. And then went to find the bus stop and read its timetable.

When the bus showed up, five minutes late (of course), he was ready, holding a fistful of muggle change that he’d found languishing at the bottom of his trunk and with the adder firmly out of sight.

“No dogs on our busses,” said the driver, a greying man in his mid-forties with a squint.

Harry jumped, and then turned to realise the dog was following him. He gave Harry a doggy smile, all tongue and wagging tail, and then turned the biggest, sweetest puppy eyes Harry had ever witnessed upon the driver.

The driver looked at the dog.

The dog whimpered softly.

The driver sighed. “There’s no one’s likely to get on this time of night,” he said, eyeing Harry, “so he can come but -- he makes a mess, you’re cleaning it. Got it?”

Harry nodded. “Yes,” he said, handing over his money. “Um, all the way to London, please.”

The driver grumbled and nodded, and then somehow Harry was in a seat in the back of the bus with his trunk and a snake napping on his shoulder and a huge filthy dog snuffling around his feet, clutching his bus ticket in one hand.

“What am I even going to do with a dog?” he wondered, scratching behind the dog’s ears when he came in reach.

The dog reached up and put one filthy paw on Harry’s jaw and whined softly. “Stop that,” Harry told him sternly, although the gesture was actually adorable and he was sure once the dog was clean and fed he’d be able to charm the pants off anybody he set his doggy mind to winning over. “Don’t you think I didn’t see what you pulled back there with the driver,” he warned.

It took over two hours to get from Surrey to Charing Cross Road, and by the time he arrived Harry had exchanged the precipice of panic for an unhappy drowsiness. The dog was napping with his huge head on Harry’s knee, and had to be shoved rather hard to be persuaded to wakefulness.

“Where are we?” hissed the adder sleepily, poking his head from beneath Harry’s shirt and tasting the city air.

“Away,” Harry hissed, because he hadn’t really figured out how to suggest ‘London’ in the snake language yet. The adder seemed to accept this for the moment because he tucked his head back inside, hissed grumpily, and told Harry to ‘tell me when it’s morning’.

By the time Harry had hauled his trunk from the bus, with the driver’s bemused assistance - “Awful big trunk for a wee thing like yourself, if you don’t mind me saying,” - the dog had vanished into the nocturnal half-light of the city, leaving nary a hair behind.

Harry realised this just as the bus departed once more and a heavy hand fell upon his shoulder.

“There you are, Mr Potter,” said a slow, deep voice.

Harry jerked and spun and found himself looking at a tall, straight-spined man with broad shoulders and long, loosely-muscled limbs. He had dark skin and an oddly reassuring face. “The Minister was worried we’d lost you,” he said.

“Er,” said Harry.

The man shrunk his trunk with a wave of his hand and handed it to Harry, and then he returned his grip to Harry’s shoulder - not the one with the snake, thankfully. It wasn’t a cruel grip, but Harry had the distinct impression he wasn’t letting go any time soon.

“Nasty business, accidental magic like that. It’s just as well you left, the muggles were -- well, they weren’t happy,” he said, shaking his head and steering Harry firmly down the road.

“They’re never happy,” Harry said automatically, allowing himself to be propelled. He hadn’t a clue what was going on, but he didn’t seem to be in terrible trouble.

The big man made a soft noise, “I’d noticed their disposition myself,” he said, and Harry could hear his smile even if he couldn’t see it. “Still, calling animals is a common one in very young children. You should be past that sort of thing at your age," he paused, allowing Harry to turn to face him, “although of course trauma..." his eyes drifted to Harry’s forehead.

Harry nervously flattened his fringe, even though he was sure the man knew what was under it. “Um,” he said, “sorry, but -- who are you?”

“Auror Shaklebolt,” he said, offering Harry one large hand.

Harry shook it, a little tentatively. “Um, Harry Potter,” he said.

The man smiled, a friendly flash of white teeth in the darkness of his face. “Come on. The Leaky Cauldron’s just up ahead,” he said. He started moving again, and Harry did not seem to be in trouble, so he followed, clutching his miniaturised trunk and taking comfort in the weight of the snake coiled over his shoulder.

“You might give some thought to exercises designed to help you control your magic, though - the teachers at Hogwarts will be able to help you,” Shacklebolt told him thoughtfully after a few moments.

“I’m sorry,” said Harry, “what?”

And then he found himself stumbling through the door of the shabby-looking Leaky Cauldron, where Tom the barman was leaning on the bar wearing nothing but his nightshirt and sleep pants, the poor man, and --

\--and the actual _Minister for Magic_ was standing there, looking just as weary as Tom but infinitely more pleased.

Harry swallowed, but he felt nervousness like a rush of ice down his spine.

“Um,” he said.

“Good work, Shacklebolt, excellent, excellent,” said the Minister, rather cheerfully. “You found him. You gave us quite a scare, Harry!”

“I did?”

“Well, of course you did,” Fudge looked baffled for a second, and then his face resolved into a smooth smile again. “Sit down, Harry, sit down,” he said, gesturing to a chair by the fire. Though they were in the common room of the pub, there was nobody about at this time of night.

As Harry watched, Fudge settled himself into his chair. Auror Shacklebolt went to stand beside the door. It didn’t seem like a very natural place to stand, so Harry wondered if it was some kind of professional protocol.

Harry carefully set himself in the chair opposite Fudge. Tom set a tea setting down on the table between them. “I’ll have something for you when you go up to your room, Mr Potter,” he said before cracking a huge yawn and turning away.

“At any rate, you’ll be pleased to know that the situation with Miss Marjorie Dursley has been dealt with. Her memory has been modified, she has no recollection of the event. Unfortunately,” he added with a half frown, “the aurors were not actually able to convince your aunt and uncle to take you back. I understand Headmaster Dumbledore is having tea with them this evening, perhaps he will be able to convince them...” he trailed off uncertainly.

Harry could only hope that Dumbledore did _not_ manage to persuade the Dursleys.

“But enough of that,” Fudge went on with more cheer, and busied himself by pouring tea, “you’re safe now, and that’s what matters. I’d started to think... Well.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Well,” he said again. Then: “For now, I have arranged for you to stay here for the evening - I would recommend you take a room here for the remaining weeks of your holidays, but that is up to you, of course. If there are friends you might stay with, or - there is another establishment down Diagon Alley, I think,” he waved vaguely with his tea cup.

Harry frowned. “Am I not -- you know, in trouble?” he wondered.

Fudge blinked at him. “Good heavens, no,” he said.

“But I broke the Decree--”

“Well, of course you did, but, Harry - accidental magic is _accidental_. Now I admit you’re a bit old for it, but it’s quite clear on Ministry records -”

“Hangon!” Harry interrupted, putting his own cup down before he’d even touched the tea in it, “Last year I got an official warning because a house elf smashed a pudding in my uncle’s house.”

“I’m quite sure the elf did it _intentionally_ ,” Fudge pointed out, “which is quite another matter. The methods for recording accidental and intentional magic are quite different.”

Harry deflated. “Oh,” he said. That... actually made sense. He hadn’t expected that. “Oh, right.”

“Well!” Said Fudge, getting to his feet once more. “I’m glad you’re safe, Harry. Enjoy your stay at the Leaky Cauldron, won’t you?”

And with a last bland smile and a kind handclasp, Fudge was gone.

“Let me show you to your room, Mr Potter,” said Tom, vanishing the tea setting - presumably back to the kitchen. “I’ll bring you up some dinner,” he added, waving his wand at a tray hidden behind the bar, which floated to follow obediently. “It’s not much, just some crumpets and butter, but the kitchen’s closed, so--”

“Yeah, it’s, er, it’s late. Sorry,” said Harry, allowing himself to be propelled before Tom.

Tom didn’t seem to mind much. “Here we are," he said, pushing open a door at the end of the corridor upstairs. The room beyond seemed worn but welcoming, with a cheery orange fire heating the place and an oak-framed bed that looked very comfortable.

Hedwig was perched on an old, free-standing wardrobe, and curled next to the fire was the dog.

“Right smart animals you’ve got there,” chuckled Tom. “That owl got here just a few minutes after you did - and your dog not long after. If there’s anything you need, Mr Potter, don’t you hesitate to ask. Er,” he added, letting the tray of crumpets descend to rest upon the table, “in the morning, if it’s all the same.”

He gave another awkward bow and left.

“Hello, girl,” he said to Hedwig, reaching out to allow her to land on his arm. She made her way up to his biceps with a few pinprick shifts of her sharp talons.

Harry eyed the dog.

The dog eyed Harry.

“How --”

Harry was interrupted when a dead mouse scampered out from under the bed, one eye missing and neck broken in several places, and tried to climb Harry’s shoe.

The dog jerked upright at the movement and made a low, murderous growling noise - but Hedwig was a lot faster. She dove, snatched and swooped away with the still-struggling mouse.

There was an awful crackle as she broke more of its bones in her beak, but the struggling didn’t stop. Harry slumped on his bed and covered his eyes while the dog stared with alarmed, wild eyes at the mouse.

“Sorry,” Harry said to the dog. “For what it’s worth, you’re not the only one who doesn’t like that much. How did you even get here?” he asked then, trying hard to ignore the frustrated noises of Hedwig trying to eat the wriggling rodent.

When the dog had run off at the bus stop, he’d assumed he wasn’t going to see him again. He didn’t actually mean to completely adopt the dog, but it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere - and he was, in Tom’s words, right smart, if he could make it here after Harry without supervision.

The dog turned away from the spectacle of Hedwig and the dead mouse, although Harry could see he kept one ear cocked in that direction. The dog panted at him, tongue out in a doggy smile, and wagged his tail.

Hedwig hooted softly. Contrary to Harry’s expectations, she didn’t seem at all alarmed by him.

Well. He supposed he’d have to find something to do with the dog when school started - smuggling the adder in when he already had a familiar was going to be hard enough! - but until then --

“Can dogs eat crumpets?” Harry wondered aloud.

The dog licked his lips and looked as though he would very, very much like to find out.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news: This chapter is longer than most of my chapters! Bad news: it has not been proof-read, beta-read or subjected to the slightest concern for its quality. Anyway, in general I hope you like this chapter, because I was amused while writing it and it pleases me when people are amused by the things that amuse me. It's a bit dumb, but definitely fun. : )

 

Despite Harry's concerns about 'adopting' the dog, he didn't seem like a terribly dependent animal. He was more like a very large, furry roommate who appeared every couple of days to mooch Harry's food and doze on his bed.

On the nights when it was a little colder, he sometimes slept with his huge furry bulk over Harry's toes, which Harry could really only welcome - even though he often subsequently woke up to a huge paw smooshing his head into the pillow.

Harry spent much of the following two weeks surrounded by animals, which was... unexpected. But not bad, actually. An adder, an owl and a dog should not have been comfortable living with one another, but aside from a few suspicious sniffs and one brief, ugly spat between Hedwig and the adder over a tiny grey mouse (a live one, as it happened), there were very few incidents.

Of course, Hedwig flew off on her own, hunting and gliding for pleasure much of the time, and the nature of a snake was to eat sparingly and sleep a lot, but the dog, when he was present, was surprisingly good company - even though he absolutely declined to perform any tricks other than 'look cute, receive free food, aw yeah'. Incidentally this was a trick he was very, very good at.

"You need a name," Harry said to the dog one morning, unsurprised when his ears pricked up. He couldn't tell how much the dog actually understood, but he certainly knew when he was being spoken to.

"What does it need a name for? It's a dog," said the adder, who had quite firmly declined any such honour for himself.

"He needs a name," Harry insisted in parseltongue, "People name pets, that's how it works."

"I thought you said it was a stray," hissed the adder slyly.

"He is a stray. But I can't keep calling him 'the dog'."

The adder made a soft hissing noise that didn't translate very well but it was fairly rude. "If it  _must_  have a name, then it should be something descriptive so your defective mammalian brain does not forget. Call it Blackdog. Or just Black. It is black, isn't it?"

Harry sighed. Then he looked back at the dog, who was watching their exchange with fascinated, gleaming eyes. "Snake says I should call you 'Black'," he told the dog, and was surprised when the dog's tail started wagging madly, threatening the furniture.

Harry eyed him. "Really?" he said dubiously. "Black?"

Black gave a loud, happy bark. His tail wagged so hard Harry wondered if he could sprain it.

"Okaaay," said Harry slowly, with the air of someone who was not touching that.

So Black it was.

Harry spent a lot of time out wandering through Diagon Alley over those last two weeks of his summer holiday. Very little had changed in the year since he'd last seen it, except for the posters. They were everywhere: wanted posters, waterproofed and ministry-stamped, featuring a gaunt-faced, dark-eyed man. Sirius Black, Azkaban escapee.

"What do you think?" Harry murmured to the dog on one occasion. "Relative of yours?"

Black looked at the wanted poster, then back at Harry, and gave him a wounded look that Harry interpreted as saying: 'What are you doing, friend, I can't eat this?'

Harry did make sure he got to pick up his school things - he'd never seen a person so relieved as the manager of Flourish and Blotts when he revealed he already had one of those vicious, biting books. Then his only other priority was finishing his homework outside in the fresh air.

It was nice not to have to sneak and hide just to get his homework done. Harry's mood improved steadily - and so did his health. He always lost weight when he lived with the Dursleys, and even a steady diet of sundaes and rich roasts from the Leaky Cauldron was doing him good.

"They're still monkeys," said the adder dismissively. "You need to be with your own kind, snakeling."

Harry rolled his eyes, but he didn't usually talk to the snake in public - if he did, he was pretty sure people would respond really badly.

While he'd explained this to the indignant and fairly cranky adder, this didn't actually stop him from providing Harry with endless commentary in soft, nearly-inaudible hissing throughout his day. Sometimes it was funny; mostly it was mean.

Black only occasionally followed Harry out, but when he did he stuck by Harry's side like a real familiar.

"He's not actually mine," he said to Florean Fortescue, a cheerful and florid-faced man who owned the ice cream parlour and had come out to bring Harry a sundae - a free one, as he had been every half-hour since Harry had settled outside under the bright sunshine to finish his essay on witch burnings.

"He's not?" Florean asked, frowning at Black, who put one paw on a chair and leaned up to nose at the sundae.

"He's a stray," Harry admitted, watching him snatch and devour a sugared cherry. He got ice cream on his nose for his effort, but he looked very pleased with himself. "He just started following me around sometimes."

Florean gave him a look of a sort of indulgent exasperation. "Hmm, maybe so. But I suspect he thinks you're his, Mr Potter," he informed him meaningfully.

Black wagged his tail. It was, as usual, a threat to basically anything in its way.

"No," said Harry, snatching up the sundae just as Black dove for it. "I know for a fact that chocolate is bad for dogs. No," he added.

Black gave him a disdainful look. His eyes drifted back to the sundae.

(Two shops over, a dead bird leapt from the gutter and smacked into a window, prompting cries of alarm.)

"No," said Harry firmly. "Here," he added, and pulled off the remaining two cherries to toss to the dog. "Thanks, Mr Fortescue," he added politely.

"Not a problem," grinned Florean.

The days passed, and Harry found himself looking for signs of Ron and Hermione in Diagon Alley as the time to leave for Hogwarts grew closer. He saw other people he knew from school, including most of the Gryffindor boys in his year.

It wasn't until the last day of the holidays that he saw Ron and Hermione, both sitting outside Florean Fortescue's. He waved to them - and then to Fortescue who nodded cheerfully at him from inside the shop - and went to sit with his friends.

Ron was looking exceptionally freckled, but his skin was still very white, especially next to Hermione - Harry suspected Ron was not the sort of person who ever tanned properly. He just got more and more freckled with exposure. He did look happy, though.

"We checked for you at the Leaky Cauldron," Ron said, kicking a chair out for him. "But Tom said you'd already left, so -"

"How did you know I was staying there?" Harry wondered, scratching his neck.

"Dad found out at work. It was kind of a big deal, 'cause you're, you know, you," Ron shrugged.

Harry sighed. Of course it was too much to ask not to be constant gossip fodder, if you were the Boy Who Lived.

"Did you really attack your aunt, Harry?" Hermione asked gravely.

Harry covered his eyes with one hand. "Maybe," he said evasively.

Ron snickered.

"It's not funny, Ron," she hissed. "He hasn't done accidental magic in years, and -" she looked around, and then lowered her voice. "Was it - you know?"

Harry hesitated, then nodded.

Ron's laughter faded. "That's not good," he muttered.

"It's really not," Hermione agreed, frowning. "Are you all right?"

Harry shook his head. "Yeah, somehow. I thought for sure - well, it's not exactly, er,  _common_  magic, is it?"

"Oh, that," said Hermione, shaking her head, "that's not quite what I meant. Accidental magic is quite different - the Ministry trace detects intent first. If it's accidental, they don't even bother to look further. They just send a member of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad out to fix whatever's gone wrong."

A pause.

"Which is rather stupid, if you ask me," she added, as though she couldn't quite help herself.

"Lucky, you mean," Ron pointed out.

"Lucky for Harry, certainly," said Hermione patiently, "but stupid for the Ministry. Anyway, I meant - well," she rubbed her nose. "Accidental magic, it's usually when you're hurt or scared, isn't it?"

Harry sighed. "I'm fine," he assured them. "I just - she was going on and on about how my parents were - drunks and unemployed and," he shook his head. "I couldn't say anything, and I just got... angry, I guess."

Hermione was frowning. "That's really irresponsible."

Ron rolled his eyes. "Lay off, Hermione. Nothing came of it," he pointed out.

"Hmm," she said, but she was eyeing Harry like something she wanted to dissect.

"Anyway," Ron said, changing the subject, "Have you seen in the news? Some nutter escaped from Azkaban."

"Oh, yes," Hermione said, "I saw that in the paper."

"And on every street," Harry added, pointing at the wanted posters stuck to walls and windows at strategic locations all through Diagon Alley. There was even one at Fortescue's!

"Well, yes," Hermione said, glancing around, " - but they will catch him, won't they?"

Ron rubbed his nose. "Maybe? They say they will, but they don't know really. Nobody's ever done it before."

"What," said Harry. "Not ever?"

"So Dad says," Ron nodded.

Hermione looked thoughtful and apprehensive all at once. "I wonder how he did it?"

Ron shrugged.

It transpired that Ron's whole family was staying the night at the Leaky Cauldron, already packed and prepared so they could just head off to King's Cross the following morning. Mrs Weasley dove upon Harry as soon as she saw him and began to ask him all sorts of things about his health and wellbeing and preparedness for Hogwarts, as as was her way. On some level Harry enjoyed the attention, although he could also see why Ron and his siblings found it a bit, well, smothering.

The other thing Harry found out about was Hermoine's new cat, which was a pug-nosed, bandy-legged beast of very unusual size. He was called Crookshanks, and purred like a freight train. He seemed determined to eat Scabbers, prompting Ron to keep him away in his room for the time being.

Black appeared around dinner time, as was  _his_ way. He was friendly to most of the Weasleys, even to Fred and George, who Harry thought might have been better viewed with caution. When Black saw Ron, though, he stared at him for a few long moments and then, oddly, seemed to decide that he needed a very thorough sniffing. He growled at odd moments and though he didn't actually seem to  _dislike_  Ron, Harry wasn't convinced enough to take chances.

"What on earth is the matter with you?" Harry wondered, pulling Black away from Ron by the scruff of his neck. He never would have been able to if the dog had put up more than a token resistance, because Black had to weigh at least as much as Harry did.

"I don't think Hogwarts allows dogs," Percy informed Harry, frowning even as he gave the dog his dinner roll and watched him devour it in a single snapping bite.

"He's a stray," shrugged Harry.

"He certainly seems to like you," Hermione said dubiously, watching as Black curled up partially beneath Harry's chair.

"I feed him," Harry pointed out, raising his voice to be heard over a sudden influx of post owls who swooped inside bearing the evening mail.

There was a yelp and a scrape behind them as one of the other patrons scraped back her chair and stumbled away from the table. Everybody looked over to her - even Black's ears perked up.

"Aurors!" she shrieked. "Floo the aurors! Dark magic is afoot!"

There was a grim second's silence, before everybody started talking all at once. "Excuse me," Arthur said, edging through the crowd. "I'm a ministry employee, I can quarantine the area- EXCUSE ME!"

When Mr Weasley finally made it through, it became clear that one of the owls delivering the post was, in fact, long dead.

Harry bit back a groan. Across the table, Hermione's wide-eyed gaze met his. "Mrs Weasley," she said, putting her hand on Molly's arm, "Harry doesn't need to be here when the newspapers show up - I'm going to take him up to his room."

Mrs Weasley blinked away from the commotion and turned to her. "Oh, of course." She said after a second, and then gave Hermione a fond pat. "That's clever thinking, Hermione. You make sure you're all packed, won't you?"

Hermione nodded dutifully and pretty much dragged Harry from his seat and up the stairs. Once the door was closed behind them she set herself on his bed and chewed her thumbnail. "Harry, you can't keep letting this get worse," she said, sounding a little panicked.

"I'm not  _letting_  anything happen!" he said, probably too sharply. "I have no idea what I'm doing! It doesn't feel like magic  _at all_."

"There has to be some way to control it," Hermione said, uncertain but firm.

Harry sighed. "That's not even the worst of it," he said, and quickly told her - well, everything. Everything that had happened over the holiday, basically.

Hermione listened, simultaneously critical and sympathetic. "It's really getting that much worse?" she said finally, chewing her bottom lip. Her brow furrowed. "I'll see if I can't look into it once we get to school. There must be  _something_  about controlling abnormal accidental magic, surely..." she trailed off, frowning.

Harry sighed. He anticipated seeing her run off to the library just as soon as they arrived at Hogwarts, honestly.

"Is that the snake, then?" she asked, nodding toward where the adder was looped over Hedwig's perch, avoiding her talons but soaking up her fluffy warmth.

Harry nodded.

"It must be fascinating," Hermione said, sounding a little bit envious.

"Not really," Harry disagreed. "Snakes are... well, even smart snakes are pretty much all about food and not getting eaten. Just because you can talk to them doesn't mean there's, you know, much actual point."

Hermione gave him a sceptical look but didn't disagree verbally.

"When do we need to get going in the morning?" he asked after a long, dismal pause, during which Hermione directed her worried gaze at nothing in particular, lost in thought.

"Immediately after breakfast, I should think," Hermione said after a pause. "Are you packed?"

Harry got up to shove  _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 3_ into his trunk, tucked beneath the soft fabric of his father's invisibility cloak. A quick glance into the trunk proved that he wasn't forgetting anything important. "I am now."

Ron showed up a few minutes later. Black trailed after him, wagging his tail in greeting and curling up next to Harry's trunk while Ron reported on the mess that was the common room of the Leaky Cauldron. "All over in aurors," he said, shaking his head. "All over one little owl? I know it's Dark stuff, but - it's one bloody owl?" he said, spreading his hands. He frowned a little. "It  _was_  you, wasn't it?"

Harry was warmed by Ron's easy dismissal of what had to be one of the weirder quirks of accidental magic ever, and nodded cautiously. "I think so?"

"You  _think_  so?" Ron repeated, squinting.

"Well I don't - it doesn't  _feel_  like anything, so..."

"So you have  _no idea_  when you're raising the dead?" Ron muttered. This was a comment that really brought home precisely how ridiculous Harry's situation was. He nodded miserably.

"Well, there's nothing we can do about it until we can get to the Hogwarts library," Hermione said primly. "So you may as well not worry about it. Besides, it's very unlikely that there'll be anything dead laying about on the Express. You'll be able to relax for the whole trip."

"Yeah," said Ron slowly, "As long as nobody's pet dies on the way."

Harry remembered one pet - a dog, from a very long time ago, crawling out of its backyard grave to cuddle up with its owners, maggots and all. He felt faintly ill. "I -"

Hermione took one look at Harry's face and whirled on Ron. "Oh, Ron! That won't happen. It's terribly unlikely. When have you ever known somebody's familiar to drop dead on the train? It won't happen, Harry," she added firmly. "It won't."

Harry just nodded. He imagined the chaos he could cause by accidentally raising somebody's pet, though, and the nausea... stayed with him.

The strangest event of the evening, though, occurred when he heard Mr and Mrs Weasley arguing behind closed doors. He didn't necessarily intend to eavesdrop, but he did hear his name come up, harsh and angry, and -

Well, he was only human. Curiosity got the better of him.

"- Harry's got a right to know," Arthur was saying. The voices weren't that clear, and Harry only got bits and pieces of the discussion.

"...happy not knowing!"

"I don't want to make him miserable, but..." Arthur's voice faded out, as though he'd turned his head.

There was another long moment in which the voices were too muffled to make out, and then Arthur's voice rose again. He sounded very strained. "Molly, we thought Azkaban was perfectly safe. If Sirius Black can break out of Azkaban, he can break into Hogwarts."

"But no one's really sure that Black's after Harry," Mrs Weasley said, sounding a touch desperate.

There was a thud on wood, and Harry was sure Mr. Weasley had banged his fist on the table.

"Molly, how many times do I have to tell you? They didn't report it in the press because Fudge wanted it kept quiet -"

Harry, having heard quite enough, walked quickly and quietly away.

He shared this overheard conversation with Ron and Hermione before breakfast the following morning, and both seemed appropriately alarmed.

Hermione covered her mouth with her hands, and she and Ron wore matching appalled expressions. "We'll have to be really, really careful," Hermione said at last. "You'll have to do your best to keep out of trouble -"

"I wasn't about to go  _looking_  for somebody who wants to murder me," Harry protested.

"How thick would you have to be?" Ron said, but he sounded shaky.

Even Black the dog seemed to understand that something was wrong, because he put his paw on Harry's knee and stared soulfully at him, whining gently.

"Aw," said Harry. He patted Black's paw. "It'll be all right, mate."

That was on of the mornings that Black did not come downstairs to beg food from them, and when Harry returned to his room to collect his trunk there was no sign of him. He took this philosophically - the dog  _was_  a stray, after all - and set off to shove his things in the ministry cars Mr Weasley had organised to take them to the station.

If he hadn't already overheard the conversation between Mr and Mrs Weasley the previous night, Harry would have been deeply suspicious of the way Arthur kept tightly to Harry as they made their way to the platform. He seemed to believe that Harry would be murdered the second he was allowed out of his sight, which Harry felt was quite absurd, since Platform Nine and Three Quarters was by no means less safe than Diagon Alley - unless you were playing on the tracks!

Nevertheless, with the exception of a three-legged spider that may or may not have been dead (Harry chose to believe it was merely unfortunate, not dead), they made their way onto the Hogwarts Express and settled themselves into the only compartment they could find with sufficient space - which was one with a thirty-something man dozing in the corner.

Or, at least, Harry was pretty sure he was dozing.

Hermione immediately identified him as Professor R J Lupin, and they theorised that he must have been one of their new teachers.

"He is, er, alive, right?" Harry asked Ron in an undertone.

"He's breathing," Ron pointed out. Harry paused and critically watched the strange man for a second, but Ron was right - his chest was moving.

So there was no chance of accidentally raising him from the dead, which Harry viewed undeniably as a good thing.

"What d'you think he'll teach?" Ron asked, peering curiously at the man's face. He was young for his grey hairs, but he looked pallid and underfed and kind of - well, sick.

"Defence," Harry suggested. The door of their compartment had slid open of its own accord, so Harry leaned over to close it and make sure it was properly latched.

A parseltongue hiss came from the vicinity of Harry's shoulder: "He smells like dog," said the adder, sounding disgusted.

"Are you sure you're not just smelling Black?" Harry asked him. Hermione looked fascinated to hear him speak, although Ron looked at the door of their compartment uneasily - but more worried for Harry than by Harry, he thought.

"I know how to smell!" The adder snapped, showing Harry his fangs in warning. "I know what that mangy mutt smells like - everything reeks of him, even in here," the snake added in a tone of distaste. "He smells like a different kind."

"I'm just asking," Harry said defensively. Then, "He's just saying he thinks Lupin has a dog," Harry told Hermione.

She smiled. "He can tell that? Does he - how does he smell? Does he taste it with his tongue, or -?" she asked hopefully.

"Dunno." Harry shrugged. "I'm not asking him. He's cranky." And indeed he was, because, muttering imprecations in a steady low hiss, the adder coiled under Harry's collar and back into the warmth of his skin.

There was a brief moment in which the Sneakoscope Ron had gifted to Harry went off with a weird, tinny whistle, and they had to muffle it with clothing and shove it to the bottom of Harry's trunk, but otherwise the trip was mostly uneventful -

Right up until the dementors came to search the train, at least.

Harry had no idea what they were, not at first. He just knew it was raining so hard it seemed like night outside their window, and the train pulled to a stop well before they should have reached Hogsmeade. The lights disappeared, thunder rumbled, lighting flared. A hideous silence fell upon the carriage, broken only by the sound of driving rain, and a chill moved over them.

A feeling of distant, numb horror fell upon them.

"What's going on?" Ron hissed. Harry could feel him next to him, strained and wary, muscles strung out with tension.

"I don't - ow! Crookshanks!" Hermione yelped.

"Quiet." The voice was low and hoarse, but comforting for all that. A handful of pale flames crackled to life in R J Lupin's hand, and his too-pale face was suddenly lit. The harsh light was not flattering.

Crookshanks hissed angrily, and there was a ripping sound that Harry was certain was the upholstery.

Gently, Harry reached up a hand to touch the adder, but he was having none of it. He wriggled away from Harry's touch, hissing curses and slithering across the back of Harry's neck to get to his other shoulder.

A huge, looming shadow glided outside their door. One long-fingered hand curled around the edge of the doorframe, and it was - it was grey and sickly. It looked the way flesh did when it had been left too long, and all the muscles beneath the dead skin had liquefied.

Harry had the sudden, hideous premonition that this was his fault. That he'd raised something horrible from a watery grave, unable to stop himself, and, and -

Panic formed in his chest. It grew claws and sunk them in deep. How did he fix it? How?

Ron clung to Scabbers in both hands, determined to stop him from escaping, and Crookshanks yowled and tried to climb up Hermione's head to get further from that looming shadow.

The towering figure drew breath, a huge, effortful death-rattle of a breath, and all warmth was sucked from the room.

Suddenly it was icy in the compartment. The dim light through the stormclouds outside leeched the colour from the world, and the storm raged and screamed outside the windows. A numbing, crawling despair settled over them; all warmth forgotten, all hope fled.

"Go," said the quiet, hoarse voice of R J Lupin, and the creature didn't move. It drew in another horrible breath. Harry trembled. He thought of Tom Riddle, poised over Ginny's lifeless body. He thought of the basilisk, huge and terrifying and dead with her eyes put out. He thought of Voldemort and a dead unicorn in a forest.

"Breathe, you twit!" Hissed a panicked voice by his ear, sibilant and urgent, and -

\- Harry heard somebody make a thin, breathy noise -

\- and something silvery shot from the end of Lupin's wand, streaming forward to chase the monster away.

But at that very same instant, a low, angry growl came from somewhere beneath their seats, and suddenly most of a huge black dog was revealed, standing between Harry and the looming cloaked figure. Harry was only peripherally aware of the silvery invisibility cloak falling from the dog's hindquarters.

Black bared his teeth and hunched his shoulders, and the snarl he made filled every corner of the lightless compartment.

"The grim," somebody whispered in the dark.

Harry's knees unhinged and his eyes rolled back in his skull.

Somebody was screaming, somebody was high and terrified, pleading for her life, pleading for her child -

"Ow!" Harry yelped. He slapped his hand over his ear at the sudden sting.

" _Breathe, you absolute moron!"_ snapped that strange, hissed voice again.

He staggered back, collapsing into Hermione, who caught him around the waist to steady him and buried her own frightened face into his shirt.

The towering, hooded creature glided away, chased by the silvery thing, and there was a trembling, distraught pause between all the occupants of the carriage.

Lupin, strangely, was staring at the dog. "I... Padfoot?" he said, disbelieving.

There was a strange squeak. Ron swore and dropped his rat. "Scabbers!" he yelped, automatically sucking on his bitten finger.

Scabbers bolted.

And Black jerked and scrambled after the frightened rat with a wrathful growl.

Lupin started. " _Stupefy_!" he roared, and his wand, already raised from casting his charm to repel the hooded creature, flicked and lit the compartment with a bright flash of light.

The stunning spell missed by a hair - it slammed into Ron's rat with a red flash instead, and with a triumphant growl Black caught Scabbers by the tail and whirled to face them.

The dog found himself on the wrong end of Lupin's wand.

There was a long pause. The sudden silence was deafening.

Black... whined. Gently. He pricked his ears and wagged his tail and gave Lupin huge, soulful eyes.

"Those eyes won't -" Lupin stopped and swallowed, staring stupidly at the rat. "Is that..." He stopped again. "Is that Peter?" His voice was no longer grim, but his wand hand was trembling and his eyes were huge. "Oh, Merlin," he breathed. He took the rat from Black's mouth gently, but he was still staring at the dog. "Oh, S- Padfoot."

"Er," said Ron, while Harry was trying hard to overcome his own shaking, "can I have my rat back?"

" _Your_  rat?" Lupin said, turning to him.

"Yeah?" Ron said, bewildered.

"I... no," said Lupin, still staring at Black. He looked down at Scabbers again, "No, sorry. I'll - if he's really a rat, I'll get him back to you," he said.

"Black," said Harry abruptly, recovering some of his breath and untangling himself from Hermione. He balanced unsteadily on his feet, feeing rather like a new foal trying to stand. "Did you - Did you  _steal_  my invisibility cloak?" he demanded.

The dog's ears drooped.

Awkwardly, he nosed the silvery cloak toward Harry.

" _Black_?" Lupin asked. "You - you named him Black?"

"Well," said Harry, eyeing Lupin. "He's black."

"I -" Lupin stopped. "I have to - I must speak with the driver. I'll - oh, bugger, I -" he dug into his shabby coat and produced a large bar of chocolate. "Share it. Eat it. It'll help. Give some to Pad - to Black, too. It'll be fine in this instance."

And then, muttering to himself, Professor R J Lupin shoved the compartment door open and stalked outside with Scabbers still clutched in one hand.

"Hey!" Ron yelled, getting shakily to his feet. "What're you going to do to Scabbers?"

"He won't be hurt if he's really a rat," Lupin called without looking back.

Over his shoulder, he added: "Eat your chocolate!"

Lupin moved like a man with purpose.

Harry suspected it was a  _mad_  purpose, but purpose nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you wanna talk stupid headcanons, read my many whinings, or be exposed to the fun and horror of my scrapped excerpts from various stories, I'm available at tozettewrites.tumblr.com : )
> 
> Additionally, you should totally leave me a comment and tell me what about this chapter you liked. And also which Marauder is cuddliest.


	5. Chapter 5

 

Black spent the rest of the train ride sprawled across what should have been enough space to fit two other people with his head on Harry's lap and his tail thumping rhythmically against the carriage wall. Ron and Hermione stayed opposite and did not try to encroach upon his territory.

"Scabbers is useless," Ron said with a great deal of concern, "but he's still my rat. I don't want anything to happen to him." He paused. "You know he bit Goyle once," he added mournfully.

"I'm sure it will be fine," Hermione assured him, breaking and nibbling at her chocolate. "He's a member of staff, Ron. He won't hurt Scabbers."

Ron didn't look convinced. "What did he even want with him, though?" he wondered, gnawing at his own portion of chocolate.

They'd all found that the chocolate  _did_  help with the lingering chill from the dementors, and so, quite against his own better judgement, Harry shared his piece with Black on RJ Lupin's advice. The dog didn't seem that affected by the dementors - but he certainly gobbled down the chocolate cheerfully.

Harry also slipped a little chocolate to the adder, but he tried a tiny sliver and turned up his nose at it. "Disgusting," he informed Harry tartly. " _Don't_  wake me up until there's flesh to eat."

"Aren't either of you a little more worried that the _dog_  managed to sneak into the carriage under Harry's cloak?" Hermione said, sounding exasperated. "Bit clever for a dog, isn't he? It's terribly suspicious. What if he's, well,  _dangerous_?"

"Yeah," said Ron, rolling his eyes. "He only jumped out to get between Harry the the dementor, I'm sure he's planning to murder us all in our sleep."

"I wasn't the one who called him  _the grim,_ " Hermione said archly. But then she frowned, and Harry wondered if she was really worried or if she just didn't like mysteries.

"Well -" Ron sputtered. "I was under the dementor's influence! And  _look_  at him!"

At this, Black flicked one ear carelessly in their direction and continued licking a lingering chocolate stain off his foreleg, creating a drool stain somewhere on Harry's knee.

"It is suspicious," Harry agreed, "but I don't think he wants to hurt anybody. I mean, he's had plenty of opportunity already, didn't he?"

"Hmm," said Hermione, unconvinced but willing to let it slide.

"Still," said Ron after a few long seconds of silence. "Bloody barmy, isn't he?"

"Professor Lupin? He certainly seemed a little..." Hermione paused uncertainly.

"Unhinged?" Ron prompted. "Loony?"

"Distressed," said Hermione primly.

Ron snorted.

Harry rubbed one of Black's silky ears thoughtfully. His eyes strayed to RJ Lupin's trunk.  _Something_  had happened there, but he didn't quite understand what. As usual, Black only put up with his absent-minded petting for so long before he shook his head, annoyed, and cast a baleful look at Harry until he stopped.

All in all, the rest of the train ride was uneventful, unless you counted rampant speculation about Scabbers and Lupin (and, occasionally, Black). Certainly nothing as dramatic as the dementors invaded their train carriage, although there was one visit from Trevor the toad - and a subsequent one from a rather ruffled looking Neville.

When it was finally time to disembark, the carriages waiting for the students were a new experience for Harry. They were light, two-wheeled vehicles with open sides. They were driven by nobody at all and pulled by dark, skeletal horses with huge leathery wings.

For a frightened second, Harry thought they were some kind of equine relative of the dementors - but as they drew closer, he could see that despite their frightening appearance they were friendly with each other and, although they were skeletal and dark, there was none of that scabrous, rotting look to their skin. Even the adder didn't seem at all concerned by them, although he did taste the air once before retreating back beneath Harry's collar.

"What are they?" Harry muttered to Hermione quietly as they approached the carriages. The horses certainly didn't seem to be bothering the other students at all, so Harry assumed they weren't dangerous - but they were certainly ugly.

"What are what?" Hermione asked, frowning at him.

"The - things. Pulling the carriages."

Hermione looked from the carriage to Harry and back in confusion.

"They're  _right there_ ," Harry said, pointing as though that would help.

"There's nothing pulling the carriages, Harry," said Hermione, frowning at him. "They're the same as they were last year - oh," she paused, "except you and Ron didn't come via the Express last year, did you?"

"No," said Harry slowly, although he was preoccupied with watching the horse-creatures, "We flew Mr Weasley's car into the Whomping Willow."

He was pretty sure he wasn't hallucinating. They pulled the carriages placidly enough. As he approached, one of them tossed its head and stamped, but it seemed as though the students around it couldn't hear the stamping of its hooves or the snort of its breathing anymore than they could see it.

Black nudged Harry in the belly with his cold, wet nose, and circled him to thump his tail against Harry's legs. He glanced down, and Black was looking straight at the creatures.

Yeah, he was pretty sure they were right there. Hermione just couldn't see them.

"Are you sure you're all right, Harry?" Hermione said cautiously as they climbed into the carriage.

The only Slytherin in the carriage was a seventh year, and she pretended she didn't know any of them, so everybody just politely pretended that they couldn't see Black, who leapt up after Harry and sat on a seat quite as though he belonged there.

"What's the matter?" Ron asked, tuning into their discussion.

Hermione pursed her lips. "Just wondering if the dementors didn't have more impact on Harry than we thought."

"You do still look pretty white," Ron said, eyeing Harry. "Not that I'd blame you. Merlin, I thought I'd never be happy again. But - well, you did sort of get a bit faint back there. I reckon you stopped breathing for a while."

"Horrid things," shuddered Hermione.

Harry nodded, but he was a great deal more interested in the flexing dark wings of the animal pulling their carriage. It was  _definitely_  there. He couldn't imagine why Hermione couldn't see it.

He rubbed his forehead thoughtfully.

As soon as they made it up to the doors of Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall was right there waiting for them. "Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, Miss Granger," she said sharply. "You will come with me."

"Blimey, they can't be in trouble  _already_ ," muttered a voice that Harry was fairly certain belonged to Seamus somewhere behind them. "We just got here!"

"You, too," added Professor McGonagall sternly, staring at Black with a particularly scary gaze. There was something knowing and terribly, terribly unimpressed about the look that she turned on that dog. Maybe she just wasn't a dog person, Harry thought.

His tail drooped. So did his ears. He edged behind Harry as though one skinny boy could hide his enormous bulk.

"What are the rest of you dawdling for?" she said more loudly to the rest of the students. "You'll miss the sorting if you don't hurry."

There was a great shifting and scuffling and a lot of murmuring voices as the rest of the students moved on toward the Great Hall.

McGonagall led them in stern silence toward the Headmaster's office, which Harry remembered from last year and which he felt he'd had more exposure to than was really necessary, thank you very much.

"Miss Granger," McGonagall said after she'd given the gargoyle the password and gestured Harry and Ron inside, "I must speak to you about your course schedule. If you don't mind accompanying me to my office?"

Hermione shot Harry and Ron one last concerned glance before she obediently followed McGonagall.

The first thing Harry noticed when he stepped into Dumbledore's office was, as always, Fawkes. He couldn't help it - a phoenix drew the eye. Fawkes trilled cheerfully at him and just the sound of it lit Harry up from the inside.

The second thing Harry noticed was a short, balding man sitting completely still and frozen in a chair that had been hastily conjured next to Dumbledore's desk. He looked, to Harry's eyes, to be under some kind of temporary petrification spell.

Lupin was there, too, pacing madly, and Dumbledore was leaning heavily against his desk, looking at the strange man with the heaviest expression Harry had ever known him to wear.

If all this wasn't odd enough, Poppy Pomfrey was also there, waiting for them like a circling vulture. Admittedly, vultures were not usually quite so dedicated to a person's wellbeing as Pomfrey, but... Well, there was something distinctly predatory about her attitude toward her patients, and that was unsettling.

She immediately eyed the pair of them suspiciously. Her gaze lingered on Harry, as did her wand when she began flicking diagnostic spells at them - which was, of course, before anybody even had a chance to speak.

"They'll be fine," she sniffed, "although goodness knows how many other children will be taken ill with those -  _creatures_  - hovering around the school. Here," she added, and pressed upon them a bar of chocolate each.

"Er," said Ron, inspecting his chocolate.

"Eat all of that, boys. It will help. All right, Headmaster, Professor - I'm going to have a word with the elves. We'll see to it that the others all receive chocolate with dinner."

"Excellent idea, Poppy," said Dumbledore cheerfully.

He waited for her to leave before he began speaking again.

"Mr Weasley," said Dumbledore gravely. "With regard to your pet rat-"

"Yeah. Where  _is_  Scabbers?" Ron demanded, giving Lupin an unfriendly look.

Lupin just looked tired. "He's here," he said, pointing at the petrified man in Dumbledore's office chair.

"What?" Ron looked blankly between them. "You... gave him to that guy?"

"No, Mr Weasley," said Dumbledore, sounding very old for a second. "Upon receiving Professor Lupin's notification about events on the train, I have performed a number of revealing charms upon your rat. He is, in fact, an animagus. I can only assume he's been living in disguise for years."

Ron looked horrified. "He's a  _person_?"

"He's a person who, until quite recently, I believed to be dead," said Lupin, shaking his head. He looked, if possible, even sicker. "I still can't believe it. If Padfoot hadn't revealed himself on the train-"

"'What ifs' get us nowhere, Remus," said Dumbledore, not unkindly. "This man's presence throws doubt on some of the Ministry's actions with regard to law enforcement, so we're just waiting for the aurors to arrive now."

Harry was looking at the man's frozen face. There was nothing in it that he could recognise. "Who is it?" he asked finally.

Dumbledore gave him a grave look. "Peter Pettigrew," he said solemnly.

That name meant nothing to Harry. "Okay," he said slowly, "but why am  _I_  here?"

Lupin scrubbed his face with his hands and drew them through his short hair.

"Harry," said Dumbledore, while Lupin looked extremely stressed and rubbed his forehead. "Sirius Black is your godfather."

Harry frowned. "He is? I thought he wanted to kill me?" he paused. The important part became much more evident in the second's silence between breaths. "I have a godfather? I don't have to stay with the Dursleys?"

Black made a soft disgruntled snort behind him.

"I thought so too," muttered Lupin, "but then Mr Weasley's rat turned out to be Peter Pettigrew."

Harry was not a genius, but he knew he wasn't  _stupid_. There was no connection between these comments that he could see. He squinted. "Alright?" he said uncertainly.

Lupin blew out a deep breath. "We thought Sirius Black had betrayed the Potters to Voldemort because he was the Secret Keeper. After they were murdered he tracked down  _him -_ " he jerked his chin at the frozen man without looking at him, and for a second his eyes were wild and dark, "- and as far as we knew, Sirius blew up  _him_  and thirteen muggles and half the street. There were witnesses everywhere."

Harry blinked. "But he's here," he nodded at the man, in whom he was beginning to take a much bigger interest.

"Because," said Lupin, tugging at his hair, " _he_  was the Secret Keeper. Sirius didn't betray anybody! Worm - Pettigrew! - cut off his finger and turned into a rat! He  _framed_  Sirius."

At the end of this truly outlandish explanation Lupin was breathing heavily. Harry wondered if he was going to be okay, because, honestly? He didn't look okay.

Lupin's face was flushed in one bright line across his cheekbones and his nose, but the rest of him was very pale. The dark circles under his eyes were standing out something fierce, and he'd run his hands through his hair so often he looked a bit like an upset hedgehog.

"So..." Harry glanced sideways at Ron, who looked back at Harry with a similarly confused expression.

"What you're saying is, my rat framed Sirius Black for murdering Harry's parents?" Ron asked uncertainly.

Lupin started to laugh. It wasn't a happy laugh. It sounded a bit like a broken hinge.

"Yes," said Dumbledore carefully, and he seemed to be pretty content to ignore the part where one of his staff was having some kind of hysterical meltdown in his office. "That is precisely what I am saying."

"That's insane," Ron said flatly.

"Er, Professor," said Harry carefully, peering at Lupin. "Maybe you'd better sit down?"

Lupin did sit down. On the floor. His laughing had turned itself into gasps. They might have been sobs. Harry averted his eyes - he was pretty sure you weren't meant to watch stuff like this.

Ron opened his mouth and Harry stepped on his toes - which was probably lucky, because that was when the Floo lit up and two aurors tumbled out.

"Sorry, Albus," said the older one, "it's been mad. Some idiot animating the dead in Diagon Alley, of all things," she shook her head, and continued much too fast for Harry to flinch and give himself away, although Ron did shoot him a look. "What's this about a fugitive in the Black case?"

The next several hours were awful. Once the aurors had verified Pettigrew's identity and packed him off to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for questioning, there was an awkward thirty minutes while they had to wait to question Ron - because, as Harry learned, he was a minor.

Neither Mr nor Mrs Weasley could be contacted, being busy with an office function specific to the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.

"He's busy," snapped a Gringotts goblin into the Floo when they tried to track down Bill Weasley.

"It is a matter of some urgency," said the older auror delicately.

"He's hanging upside down over a cursed tomb trying to untangle the flesh-flaying curse from an ancient ring we tracked from Snagov monestary," sneered the goblin. Then his lips curled in a smile that was made somehow more unpleasant by the firelight. "But I'd be happy to go and interrupt him if you'd like," he said in an oily voice.

"Er," said the auror, "no. Thank you. We'll... try somebody else."

The goblin cut the connection without saying goodbye.

What they eventually got was Charlie Weasley, with a fresh burn on one shoulder and freckles so intense he looked like he actually had a tan. Harry had met him once, briefly, in his first year, but it had been quick and quite dark. He was surprised to see that Charlie's hair was actually just as bright as the rest of his family's.

Charlie seemed horrified to learn that Ron's pet rat had been an animagus who had faked his own death for reasons that were not yet entirely clear to the ministry. The aurors, with Charlie's permission and attendance as advocate, whisked Ron away for an interview.

This left Harry alone with Lupin and Dumbledore - and the dog.

Lupin's laughter and subsequent crying jag had subsided at some point between Floo calls. Harry might have been wary of him, but Black had approached him when he'd stopped sobbing and, in a very rare display of outright affection, licked his chin and whined until he was petted. Lupin was clinging to him now.

That was... weird, Harry thought. But apparently Lupin had been really good friends with Harry's parents  _and_  Sirius Black  _and_ Ron's rat, so Harry supposed he could understand why it might have all been overwhelming.

Harry could appreciate all this, and he tried very hard to fix his attention on Dumbledore.

"A busy start to the school year!" said Dumbledore cheerfully, finally sitting at his desk. "We should all be pleased we have this chance to right some old wrongs. Sherbert lemon?" he asked, gesturing to the pot on his desk.

Harry declined to try one of the lollies Dumbledore was so fond of.

"I'm going to -" Lupin got to his feet, interrupting awkwardly. He didn't look well. "I'm going to go. I'll -" his gaze landed on Harry and his voice stopped.

Dumbledore gave him a kind, compassionate smile. "Professor Lupin, it's quite all right. You've had a severe shock this evening. A lie down would do you good, I think."

Lupin blinked. His eyes shifted from Harry back to the headmaster. "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, I'll -" a pause. "Good night, then."

He left. Black nosed Harry once in the ribs and then followed after him with his claws clicking gently on the floors.

Harry watched after them curiously for a second, but then his attention was drawn back to Dumbledore, who offered him the sherbert lemons again.

"You're sure?" he prompted. "Fantastic things, muggle sweets - you always know what you're getting. I quite liked Bertie Bott's in my youth, but I had the misfortune to come across a vomit-flavoured one. Terrible business, Harry," he said gravely. "Terrible business."

Harry found himself smiling slightly in spite of his misgivings about the whole evening. It was a very weird night, but there was something very soothing about the constancy of Dumbledore's candy fixation.

"Oh well," he lamented, and put his lollies away. "I did want to talk to you about the topic we spoke on just before the summer break. How is controlling your accidental magic going?"

Harry winced. "Er," he said. "It's... not great," he admitted.

Dumbledore's brow furrowed. "It's very important, Harry," he said quietly. "I know it may be tempting to use that kind of power, but -"

"No!" Harry interrupted, "It's not - it's not that! I just..." he paused, trying to figure out how to explain it. "I don't even know what I'm doing, sir. I can't feel it. I don't have to think about it. I don't - it just keeps  _happening_. There was a cockroach I couldn't kill over summer, sir. It wouldn't die, no matter how much I wanted it to. I don't know what to do."

Harry paused for a second.

"Er, Auror Shacklebolt said I might ask teachers here for help controlling it?" he suggested awkwardly.

Dumbledore gave him a long, searching look. After a moment he sighed. "A loss of control of accidental magic is common in traumatised children up to a certain age," he admitted. "Have you been struggling with any of your other magic, or has it just been animating?"

Harry dropped his eyes to his hands, which were twisting in his lap. "Just the animating," he said.

"I rather thought so," Dumbledore said kindly. "I wish I could give you another answer. I can see this is hard for you. But magic is largely a matter of intention. If it is truly impossible for you to control, I would strongly recommend you schedule an appointment for counselling with Madam Pomfrey."

Harry stared. " _Counselling_?" he repeated. He wasn't crazy, he was just raising the dead!

Dumbledore sighed deeply. "It's an unfortunate truth that our conscious minds are not all there is to us, Harry. A great deal of magic comes from places in our minds that may never see the light of day - and there may be parts of you, Harry, that do dearly wish for the dead to be raised."

Harry thought about that for a second. His heart was thumping wildly. "Oh," he said, swallowing.

Dumbledore offered him a sad, compassionate smile. "I had hoped you might get the hang of it without any intervention, since it is likely to be unpleasant at best, but..."

"Yeah," said Harry. "I'll, um, I don't really want to talk to Madam Pomfrey."

"I won't make you," Dumbledore said, "since it would be pointless if you weren't willing."

His gaze became sharp and lightless for a second, and he leaned forward. "But you must, Harry, you  _must_  master this. You cannot let  _it_  control  _you_."

Harry swallowed nervously again. "I... I'll do my best, sir," he said slowly.

Dumbledore settled back into his seat, and his gaze was calm and welcoming again.

"That's all anybody could ask," he assured him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple people asked for clarification either here on ffnet: Harry does not have a special connection to the dementors, and the voice speaking to him on the train was not Voldemort, it was the snake.

**Author's Note:**

> I have plans for the story, but somehow I'm struggling with the writing of it, so updates will be quite slow I think. Also I am totally rocking this platonic Hermione+Harry vibe and none of you can stop me. 
> 
> Also there will be slash in this story and if you get upset about it I'll laugh in your face.


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